In the Age of Analytic Reading: Understanding Readers’ Engagement with Text by Colleen Pennell

SEAN

…Ms. Wilson. She's a grown-up and she said her daughter got earrings in third grade, and she said her daughter was scared on the chair, but Ms. Wilson said she was brave to do it, so you can be brave when you run away.

Likewise, Michael elaborated on this line of thought by citing an experience with his family:

MICHAEL

Well, I held a dead raccoon. I was driving a dead raccoon into the - that my dad shot its head off with a shotgun and so we were driving it to the junkyard.

JACOB

That’s brave. Using a weapon.

MICHAEL

Yeah. But me and my mom were so scared my mom was so scared that she just threw it in there.

This exchange typified how students leveraged their experiences as a means to substantiate arguments and analyze character traits. Moreover, the discussion underscores the socially situated nature of interpretation as evidenced when Jacob defined a key characteristic of bravery as using a weapon. This propelled the group to consider if any fallacies were present in his original line of thinking where he argued that Frog and Toad were scared and not brave, because from Jacob’s viewpoint, bravery and fear could not co-exist. Therefore, the question was posed “Can you be scared and use a weapon?” Students didn’t cite text evidence to advance their argument but rather relied on experiential knowledge just as Sean did below.